Everyone knows children are getting fatter and that both a poor diet and a lack of exercise are to blame. But, what researchers have been unable to discover until now, is exactly how major a role activity plays in the battle to keep obesity at bay.
A new report published in the journal PLoS Medicine, offers new hope for parents concerned about the growing obesity epidemic. It suggests that making even small increases to your daily exercise routine, such as walking your child to school each day instead of taking the car, could have dramatic long-term results.
Using the latest cutting-edge techniques, researchers from Bristol University's Children of the 90s project discovered that doing 15 minutes a day of moderate exercise lowered a child’s chances of being obese by almost 50 per cent. As long as the activity was at least of the level of a brisk walk - enough to make your child a little out a breath - it seemed to be of benefit.
What makes the results particularly startling is both the large number of UK children studied and the use of high-tech equipment, providing the most accurate measures of both fat and activity levels ever achieved for a study of this type.
Researchers monitored 5,500 12-year-olds from the Children of the 90s research project (also known as ALSPAC, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) based at the University of Bristol, measuring their activity levels for 10 hours a day.
Each child wore a special ‘Actigraph activity monitor’, which sits on a belt around the waist and records every move they made. Most wore the movement-sensitive monitor for a week but all used the Actigraph for at least three days.
They also had their body fat measured using an X-ray emission scanner, which differentiates both muscle and fat deposits in the body. This is far more precise than the usual BMI (Body Mass Index) system often used to estimate fat levels.